Judy Faulkner might not be a household name yet, but in the health care industry, she’s simply known as Judy. She is the founder and chief executive officer of Epic Systems, a privately-held $1.5 billion (2012 revenue) company that sells electronic health records [...]. Read More »

Phillip Ragon, known as Terry, has quietly built Cambridge, Mass-based InterSystems into a $443 million (2012 revenues) company, selling the guts of electronic health records: databases that can easily ramp up and allow doctors to quickly retrieve patient information. [...] Read More »

...Today, the agencies are moving down separate modernization paths, with DOD working on its Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization program (DHMSM) and VA planning commercial acquisitions for the next generation of its Veterans Integrated System Technology Architecture, known as VistA. But analysts, including one of the founding developers of VistA, point to years of missed opportunities for DOD to leverage what many consider to be superior existing capabilities in VA’s VistA system — an ecosystem of modular application components that in most cases have become industry standards (VA’s troubled scheduling system notwithstanding)...

The estimated cost of developing an integrated electronic health record for the Defense and Veterans Affairs Departments spiraled to nearly $12 billion by last September, VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker said in a press call this morning. The mounting costs led top leaders of the two departments to call a halt to the joint effort on Feb. 5. Read More »

It is a widely accepted myth that medicine requires complex, highly specialized information-technology (IT) systems. This myth continues to justify soaring IT costs, burdensome physician workloads, and stagnation in innovation — while doctors become increasingly bound to documentation and communication products that are functionally decades behind those they use in their “civilian” life.Read More »

In many ways and definitely based on the buzz, Epic is at the top of the hospital EMR market. According to one estimate, about 40 percent of the U.S. population has its medical information stored in an Epic EMR, a stunning number given the level of competition in the hospital EMR space. Read More »

M is a multi-user, strongly imperative language designed to manipulate and control massive databases. It is used in the high availability, high reliability niche of the computer market—which includes banking and hospitals. It provides simple data abstractions, in which all data values are strings of characters, and all data can be structured as multiple dimensional arrays. M data structures are sparse, using strings of characters as subscripts. M is itself a language combined with a database engine

...Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on this and wish to announce what I am calling openMDWS. openMDWS is designed to be a fully open source architecture that addresses all the issues I’ve described above. It is completely compatible with and interoperable with the VA’s MDWS initiative, but will allow MDWS services to be developed and used on both Caché and GT.M systems, without requiring any additional technologies... Read More »

Four commercial vendors will submit proposals Friday for the Defense Department’s $11 billion electronic health record system contract...Teams bidding on the Pentagon’s EHR system – formally known as the Defense Healthcare Management System Modernization – are...

Defense Department intransigence on the subject of its electronic health record is well known, as is the collapse earlier this year of an effort to create a joint core system that both it and the Veterans Affairs Department would utilize. Read More »

In computing, the term legacy system has come to mean an application or a technology originally crafted decades ago, one important to the success of an enterprise, and which at least some people consider obsolete. But age alone does not make something obsolete – we still read and appreciate Shakespeare a half-millenium after his death, and paper clips from over 100 years ago are still familiar to us today, We must recognize that software is also part of our technical and cultural heritage (see Software Heritage). As in much else in our daily lives, legacy and heritage are intertwined.

New York State is currently performing the largest deployment of VistA in the United States (outside of the Department of Veterans Affairs). This development is taking place at the Office of Mental Health (OMH), and it is bringing together State Government, Industry and Academia in an open and agile collaborative environment, creating the perfect conditions for promoting the growth of the VistA open source community. Read More »

Epic is the nearly undisputed king of the electronic health records world. About 40% of the U.S. population has its medical information stored in an Epic electronic health record (EHR), and the company often sits atop research firm KLAS' rankings of best-available EHR systems. Read More »

This four and a half day course introduces a programmer to the MUMPS language and teaches its effective use in creating real applications in the VA's VistA setting. Greg is the person the VA hires to teach its new programmers. It is rarely if ever possible to sign up for his courses as they are usually closed except to unless a company hires Greg to teach a block of 10-24 people at once. Read More »